Women For Afghan Women

Afghan Women Rising

Forced Marriage

Afghan Women Key to Sustainable Peace in Afghanistan

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Published in The Hill, 08/16/2018 By Manizha Naderi and Megan E. Corrado For years, the United States has engaged in backchannel talks with the Taliban to little avail. However, news that principal deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, Alice Wells, met with the militant group in Doha last month represents the latest wave of diplomatic efforts to address America’s longest running war. In this endeavor, the U.S. empowered one if its most experienced diplomats, at once forcing the Taliban to confer with a woman as a condition for dealing with the U.S. directly, while simultaneously demonstrating leadership in the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls for incorporating women into all facets of peacebuilding processes. These successive waves of women’s leadership in dialogue with the Taliban — and the latter’s acquiescence to participation — may signal a relaxation of their hardline positions toward …

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Brought Together by Pain, 3 Girls Forced Into Marriage Have New Dreams

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Published in The New York Times, 10/6/2017 By Rod Nordland Kabul, Afghanistan — Afghanistan is a place where all too often a young girl’s dreams die. But not always. So it has been with three Afghan friends, whose unrelated cases were all so awful that they are painful to talk about even now that the three are young women, years after the trauma. Each of them escaped a forced marriage as a child, is lucky to be alive, and knows it. Each of them has big dreams — despite what has happened, and because of it. For one of them, Gul Meena, 18, dreams have already started coming true. Last month she boarded a flight from Kabul to Östersund, Sweden, via Istanbul and Stockholm, accompanied by an American lawyer. It was Gul Meena’s first time in an airplane, first time out of her country, first time that, as she put it before, “I will be free.” Gul Meena’s first dream was to escape Afghanistan. Her next was to have a television set in her room. She said she wanted to see how her …

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